As for the 47%: They don’t. Pay income taxes that is. Which is why the case for tax reform has always been so hard to make. And why this week’s effort by the MSM to drag Romney down won’t work any more than last week’s try by Obama’s fans in the big media.

What is amazing is that the collective Borg of Beltway talkers and scribblers seem to be wholly unaware of the impact at home of the meltdown abroad –wholly unaware.

They also seem prepared to overinvest in the 47% tape just as they did in Romney’s press conference a week ago, in both instances betting wildy and wrongly that their snap collective herd instincts are right as to the voting public.

They are willing the president to be having a good run, but the president isnt having a good run because his foreign policy has collapsed even as QEForever telegraphs the Fed’s panic and the price of gas is above $4 in many places and even as the dread of permanent joblessness above 8% spreads.

Lots of herds have been wrong lots of time in the past, but usually they were stampeded by honest-to-goodness events and data as opposed to something so manifestly closed to real data as their Twitter feeds.

They’ll have a chance to recover because another bad jobs report or the debates will give them a chance to walk back their assertions of mid-September as Romney extends his lead. They’ll come up with think pieces explaining how the openings Romney created for the presient simply couldn’t be exploited because of the terrible run of events abroad.

In fact, it is MSM’s darkest hour, and their stalled momentum as reliable news gatherers has even their strongest supporters worried.